Monk Needs a Complete Rework

[Valence]

If people think that Six Sided Star's only use is just before a downtime or a kill "like tornado kick", I seriously urge you to learn to use it. It's an absolutely great tool for every kind of disconnect due to mechanics (or a great GL safeguard if you fuck up).

Also what the hell are you on about, Riddle of Earth is one of the most insane, if not the most potent skill in all of monk's arsenal. 30s free of positionals every minute on top of a defensive buff is just crazy. Use it.

[VentVanitas]

If people think that Six Sided Star's only use is just before a downtime or a kill "like tornado kick", I seriously urge you to learn to use it. It's an absolutely great tool for every kind of disconnect due to mechanics

No, not every kind of disconnect. Keep in mind that SSS keeps us from using our actual disengage tool, Meditate. Some disconnects aren't long enough to justify using SSS (outside of high level optimization) when with the same time it takes us to use and recover from it, we can build 3 Chakra instead.

It's mediocre presentation as a situational disconnect tool is what has people upset about it, hence it being compared to TK, another situational skill. If it were something like a backstep however, it'd be far less egregious.

[Sqwall]

No, not every kind of disconnect. Keep in mind that SSS keeps us from using our actual disengage tool, Meditate. Some disconnects aren't long enough to justify using SSS (outside of high level optimization) when with the same time it takes us to use and recover from it, we can build 3 Chakra instead.

It's mediocre presentation as a situational disconnect tool is what has people upset about it, hence it being compared to TK, another situational skill. If it were something like a backstep however, it'd be far less egregious.

I have gotten used to using SSS right before Forbidden when it's ready. I don't really care how clunky it is when it's used as a disengage, but I do see that it is really great to use with Forbidden and Elixir field. It's just a crumby oGCD, but it is powerful compared to other skills. It is a nice compliment to forbidden to use during the extended recast time it tacks on.

I often find SSS critting for 50-60k with forbidden critting as well into the 40-50k range. Follow up forbidden with elixir or shoulder tackle. Just need to fill in that gap.

I'll use it this way until they change it, and I don't see a problem currently. Optimized rotations will argue, but monk is friggin busted and I don't care anymore.

[wereotter]

No, not every kind of disconnect. Keep in mind that SSS keeps us from using our actual disengage tool, Meditate. Some disconnects aren't long enough to justify using SSS (outside of high level optimization) when with the same time it takes us to use and recover from it, we can build 3 Chakra instead.

It's mediocre presentation as a situational disconnect tool is what has people upset about it, hence it being compared to TK, another situational skill. If it were something like a backstep however, it'd be far less egregious.

But... consider this, that's STILL a DPS loss to meditate over using Six Sided Star. Each chakra stack represents 1/5 of a Forbidden Chakra, being 74 potency each, or in the case of gaining three when you disconnect, 222 potency. If you use Six Sided Star when you do a disconnect, you're getting 400 potency from using the skill. This means you're getting about twice the potency from using the new tool to disconnect over continuing to do the Heavensward technique of meditating when you disconnect.

[Mikey_R]

But... consider this, that's STILL a DPS loss to meditate over using Six Sided Star. Each chakra stack represents 1/5 of a Forbidden Chakra, being 74 potency each, or in the case of gaining three when you disconnect, 222 potency. If you use Six Sided Star when you do a disconnect, you're getting 400 potency from using the skill. This means you're getting about twice the potency from using the new tool to disconnect over continuing to do the Heavensward technique of meditating when you disconnect.

However, these 2 situations are not comparable, as you do not use Meditate as a disconnect, you use one of your GCDs. This means you have to take into account that GCD + meditate to make it comparable to a SSS disconnect.

This means, you have to take SSS's potency and take away the potency of a GCD, which leaves the potency that meditate has to cover. Going through all of Monk's GCDs, the potency difference ends up like this:

Positive numbers are in SSS favour and negative numbers are in GCD favour.

Twin Snakes (170) = 230
Dragon Kick (200) = 200
Snap Punch (230) = 170
True Strike (240) = 140
Demolish (480) = -20
Bootshine (450) = -50 (Note I took crit damage increase as 1.5)

As you can see, in most cases, in a general potency vein, SSS will win out, even taking into account 1 or 2 miditation stacks (True Strike becomes better if you get 2 meditation stacks).

However, this still is not the end of it as you then have to take into account disconnect time. If the disconnect time is shorter than SSS GCD, then it is not going to be worth it as delaying your main GCD rotation will provide less potency overall. This fact could also start bumping up some other GCDs into the category of higher overall potency per second (though I'm not going to do the maths on that, so no guarantees).

In short, it does go deeper than just meditate vs. SSS and there is alot of stuff behind the scenes that could mean one is better than the other dependant on your GCD speed and disconnect time and, unless you know everything about every encounter, you will lose damage.

[VentVanitas]

But... consider this, that's STILL a DPS loss to meditate over using Six Sided Star. Each chakra stack represents 1/5 of a Forbidden Chakra, being 74 potency each, or in the case of gaining three when you disconnect, 222 potency. If you use Six Sided Star when you do a disconnect, you're getting 400 potency from using the skill. This means you're getting about twice the potency from using the new tool to disconnect over continuing to do the Heavensward technique of meditating when you disconnect.

I admit that for the point I'm about to bring up, it was a bad argument. The optimization hell of uptime, disconnects and SSS vs Meditate quite literally depends on the exact disconnect in a specific fight as well as the amount of Chakra in the gauge (thank you, RNG). However, the main point I wanted to get across is that we shouldn't pat SE on the back for making a skill like Six Sided Star on MNK. I get quite worried seeing people praise it for being "versatile" when it's pretty much the opposite, a situational skill. Yes, it has its uses, but it still doesn't excuse its, to be frank, backwards design.

I don't want the development team getting the wrong idea with SSS thinking that it's what MNK needed, and that it needs more skills like it. Because it sure as heck doesn't. Yes, I know no one from the dev team reads these threads, but it has me paranoid nonetheless.

[Sqwall]

I don't want the development team getting the wrong idea with SSS thinking that it's what MNK needed, and that it needs more skills like it. Because it sure as heck doesn't. Yes, I know no one from the dev team reads these threads, but it has me paranoid nonetheless.

The history for monk shows otherwise. It has always seemed to me the devs want monk to be something completely different from all the other classes. Now while I like the fact that each job needs and should feel different to play, and that's what makes people identify with a particular class.

Monk however is a chore to play.

That being said monk has never really kept up with the other jobs playstyles. I look at all the jobs (with the exception of bard) having evolved leaps and bounds over Monk. Where some if not most jobs have skills that are replaced with traits that give you improved skills with flashy new animations.

Monk got a baked turd for 3 expansions and players were told "Just use the same skills you have been using...it'll be fine!" *as we are shooed away like a child* All the while we are given "new" skills that are just plain...useless and pretty much relegated to hotbar trash. For crying out loud One Ilm Punch hung on for a LONG time before it finally got the boot. I took that crap off my hotbar 5 min after I was "awarded" the skill.

Could we have gotten something in the vein of traited skill replacements?

Dragon Kick is upgraded with a trait to grant 1 chackra with a new flashy animation. Sure!

Demolish is upgraded with a trait to allow using Tornado Kick without using GL. Tornado Kick cooldown increased to 30 seconds. Why not!

These are ideas SE doesn't want to implement to monk as they don't want to spend the time to make the job cool and FUN to play. I say this because they spent the last 7 years believing it was fine...yet here we are soon with a complete revamp of monk.

[SpeckledBurd]

The history for monk shows otherwise. It has always seemed to me the devs want monk to be something completely different from all the other classes. Now while I like the fact that each job needs and should feel different to play, and that's what makes people identify with a particular class.

I'd actually say that going from ARR into Heavensward they introduced mechanics onto other jobs that were basically differently flavored Greased Lightning in Blood of the Dragon, Enochian, and they elevated Huton to that by giving Ninja Armor Crush. In terms of the pressures the jobs were subject to and how strict timers were, BotD, Enochian and Greased Lightning were all fairly similar. Recovery was uneven between them, with Monk having a significantly longer cooldown on Perfect Balance than Enochian or Blood of the Dragon but the ability to slowly rebuild stacks when it was on CD, while a Dragoon or a Black Mage losing their respective buff would be out of luck for until the minute it took for the BotD/Enochian to come off cooldown. Monk still ended up getting the short end of the stick in terms of fight design because being able to recover from losing your buff every 60 seconds gives more flexibility for forced disengages than only being able to recovery at max speed every 3 minutes.

The problem was, moving into Stormblood they alleviated all of those pressures on Black Mage and Dragoon by making their buffs much harder to lose over the course of a rotation. On top of that both Black Mage and Dragoon both gained a means of instantly refreshing those buffs with a button press (Spamming Transpose or hitting BotD again respectively). They also lost their significant penalty for letting it fall off, as Enochian and Blood of the Dragon both had their cooldowns reduced to 30 seconds so if they dropped they wouldn't go more than a few GCDS before they'd get it back. However Monk didn't get that same treatment, it's tool for refreshing Greased Lightning was Riddle of Earth, which was utterly worthless in a ton of situations (including the situation of a Scholar Critting their Adlo because shields block it's activation) or would require some scummy play to activate like taking a hit that would give you a vuln stack. Shadowbringers ended up being more offensive due to the devs being willing to completely eliminate the difficulty of upkeeping buffs that were by all rights direct equivalents to Greased Lightning on other jobs while Monk still hadn't even caught up to buff upkeep levels other jobs had in Stormblood despite receiving a new skill for it (and possibly two from an internal development perspective from how they talked about 6SS in the media tour). And obviously we saw how that went. Anatman's history is well known and Six Sided Star for all that it's useful as a disengage tool was still redundant with other parts of the kit even if it was better so it was always doomed to make people mad.

I'm not convinced this all happened because they wanted Monk to be different. Instead I think it's because they convinced themselves that Monk was already complete and so they utterly failed to implement the lessons they learned on other jobs that had mechanics that nearly directly copied Greased Lightning in development. Had Form Shift refreshed Greased Lightning in 4.0 and Riddle of Earth didn't exist, Monk would have been at parity with Black Mage as far as buff upkeep went and there wouldn't be two expansions worth of excess GL upkeep buttons for people to mad about.

This is also why I feel like the goal of the upcoming rework is just completely missing the mark. They've said that the goal is to eliminate the stress of upkeeping Greased Lightning... but there's no issue with that now. Monk has achieved parity with Black Mage and Dragoon in 5.3 by letting you upkeep it with one button. The problems we have lie elsewhere in the kit. Monk needs an actual recovery skill for Greased Lightning because right now it doesn't have one, Anatman is terrible for building more than one stack and useless otherwise, and they accidentally turned Perfect Balance into a Meikyo Shisui like damage cooldown with Leaden Bootshine. There's too many skills/traits that just do nothing at all like Tornado Kick and the Fist Stances. The lack of new skills we actually get to use rotationally has made people frustrated for two expansions now. Meanwhile there's things the players actively hate like RNG Chakra which should have been fixed but haven't. Greased Lightning is only tangentially related to that. The only reason I can feel somewhat good about the upcoming rework is that turning Greased Lightning into a trait forces them to change most of the things that are actually problems so they might end up fixing some of these problems on accident. It also prevents them from making at least one of the stupid mistakes they made multiple times from happening again by making new skills to refresh Greased Lightning impossible.

[Sqwall]

This is also why I feel like the goal of the upcoming rework is just completely missing the mark. They've said that the goal is to eliminate the stress of upkeeping Greased Lightning... but there's no issue with that now. Monk has achieved parity with Black Mage and Dragoon in 5.3 by letting you upkeep it with one button. The problems we have lie elsewhere in the kit. Monk needs an actual recovery skill for Greased Lightning because right now it doesn't have one, Anatman is terrible for building more than one stack and useless otherwise, and they accidentally turned Perfect Balance into a Meikyo Shisui like damage cooldown with Leaden Bootshine. There's too many skills/traits that just do nothing at all like Tornado Kick and the Fist Stances. The lack of new skills we actually get to use rotationally has made people frustrated for two expansions now. Meanwhile there's things the players actively hate like RNG Chakra which should have been fixed but haven't. Greased Lightning is only tangentially related to that. The only reason I can feel somewhat good about the upcoming rework is that turning Greased Lightning into a trait forces them to change most of the things that are actually problems so they might end up fixing some of these problems on accident. It also prevents them from making at least one of the stupid mistakes they made multiple times from happening again by making new skills to refresh Greased Lightning impossible.

This is the single most important thing to be said about monk in 7 years. Monk IS being changed, and we don't know what to. However, I think that we can all agree what we have now....sucks. The job could be SOOO much more, and I simply don't understand some of the comments on this thread that consider monk is perfect. You're lying to yourself if you think it's perfect, and your only hurting others by claiming this.

SE is going to change monk, it's coming, weather we like it or not. We mustn't get caught up in the idea monk works for every situation, because it does not. This quote sums up EVERYTHING I have been pushing for, and truer words have never been spoken about monk.

Thank you SpeckledBurd. This is one of the most heated, longest, most posts, single topic threads I have ever seen. And it keeps going due to the fact gamers/players want monk to change and for the better. We would not be posting this if we didn't feel so strongly about it.

[wereotter]

snip. (post regarding other jobs getting GL lite mechanics)

I would point out that Monk was, to a degree, the forerunner to a lot of the resource stacks we see on other jobs now, but its suffers from being implemented early. In Heavensward, monks got the chakra mechanic, which usually was just one or two uses was all in a fight because the only way to get them back then was to actually press the meditate button. Chakras then feel a lot like the test run for ninki, black/white mana, kenki, esprit, battery & heat, and all the other resources other jobs build up and spend. I don't know if this is a direct relation to how it was created in the first place, or just a refusal to evolve it, but while it was something new at the time, it's now the worst one of all the options since it can't over-cap. Every other job needs 50/80 of the 100 available to actually use their big skill where monk has a max stack of 5 and needs all 5 to use its skill.

I'll agree with you, though. I HATE having chakra stacks buried under layers of RNG. Not only is there a chance that I'll get a critical hit, but then it's still just a chance that the critical hit will actually give me a chakra stack. This was an even bigger slap in the face last expansion where bards had a similar mechanic, but every critical dot tick gave them a repertoire stack